That was his needle neck exposed on the same chopping block of public opinion where others have seen their political fortunes guillotined by the singularly galvanizing issue of state versus parents in the pull-of-custodianship over a child’s mind.

One can only imagine how severe the backlash must have been for McGuinty to reverse himself just 54 hours after strongly defending the merits of a new curriculum that had been formulated during two years of consultation. The contents were available online for several months but had disappeared by Friday: Poof, gone.

Scrapping the endeavour, with a promise to more fully engage parents in formulating the next “rethink’’ blueprint, might be seen as a victory for populist opposition. Conversely, it also reveals a government weak at the knees, anxious to appease an electorate that just might be angry enough to punish at the polls, even if that means turning turtle on some core beliefs.

Former education minister Kathleen Wynne, the province’s first openly lesbian cabinet minister, surely expressed the view of many progressive education advocates when she called the Tories “despicable’’ for opposing the plan. “You’re aligning yourselves with homophobes!’’ she shouted across the benches at Queen’s Park.

But Wynne’s cri de coeur might have been more accurately an expression of betrayal aimed at her own party. They have the majority to move ahead on this and risk the consequences. They pulled the plug.

I’ve no doubt that homophobia is a component in the recoil from a curriculum that would have included discussion of sexual orientation in Grade 3. The pointy end of dissent has come from faith-based groups (of all persuasions) that cling to rights of intolerance afforded Catholic and privately funded religious schools. Separation of church and state applies only to the public school system, though everybody would have been required to teach the proposed curriculum. How this could ever have been managed defies comprehension. The best this curriculum’s defenders could offer was, well, yank your kid out of the sex ed class. That is not a reasonable response.

Still, homophobia — while a handy accusation to toss around — is emphatically not why so many parents revolted when delivered this fait accompli, now quickly withdrawn. I have enough faith in my fellow citizens to feel confident saying the vast majority of Ontarians recognize sexual orientation is a given and a right. We are so far past harmful judgment and discrimination.

It’s the age of the thing that elicited gasps of disapproval, and the spoon-fed doses of sexual enlightenment as prescribed by alleged education experts that rankles. Nearly every buttonholing interview of parents conducted by the media over the last three days turned up deep reservations about introducing 6-year-olds to sex, whether in the public or separate school system. These youngsters are still learning their ABCs and suddenly there’s a detour to the idiomatic Ps, corrected for proper terminology? Then, a mere two years later, we’d have those children instructed on “healthy relationships’’ and sexual orientation, subjects so complex that many adults would receive failing grades.

Sex is not just another subject, like geography or civics, and it is never — despite what the ministry’s professional consultants would have us believe — value-neutral. That would be health education, a far different syllabus than the content promoted by this ambitious curriculum.

Parents are rightly proprietary about their children and the morals they hope to nurture in them. In such a richly multicultural city, where so many families are immigrants and first-generation Canadians of diverse, often conservative faiths and cultures, it was demanding a great deal for parents to accept invasive sex instruction in the schools at complete variance with ethics taught at home.

While many of us may disagree with some of those moral paradigms, we can’t compel others to change their personal views, or meekly hand us their very young children so that we can shape theirs.

In its own way — and one could argue for utterly commendable reasons — the new sex education curriculum, as conceived, is just orthodoxy by other means. It pretends to be values neutral, indeed makes a virtue of this, while promulgating what is essentially an alternative moral code as defined by those who wrote the curriculum. Parents instinctively understood this.

The proposed curriculum went well beyond instruction on body parts, prevention of disease and pregnancy and exploration of sexuality/orientation. Who, after all, defines a “healthy relationship?” I understand urging boys and girls to respect their own bodies but maybe my idea of a healthy relationship is distinctly at odds with prevalent opinion. Clearly, a lot of parents — although likely coming at it from the opposite end of the spectrum — had similar concerns.

There is no such thing as sermon-free sex education in the hands of teachers rather than health professionals. This curriculum was simply dogma from a different gospel text.

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